Immigration Justice Clinic
(Law 833A/833B)

6 credits/semester (4 clinical and 2 academic) or 4 credits/semester (2 clinical and 2 academic), two semesters required

Handling their own cases, students represent indigent people living, working, or detained in Westchester, Rockland, Dutchess, Putnam, and Ulster counties who seek regularization of their legal status through family ties, employment, or pursuant to the Violence Against Women Act and the Anti-Trafficking Act. Clients are referred by a variety of legal services and immigration assistance providers.

Student attorneys engage in fact-gathering interviews with potential clients, assess clients’ immigration options, develop theories of the case, and a plan for each legal remedy to be pursued. They research and draft memoranda of law, analyze the need for expert assistance to substantiate or fortify clients’ claims, and, when appropriate, recruit expert consultants. Students are also responsible for monitoring a client’s ongoing legal and non-legal needs that may affect the progress and outcome of the case. 

If a case proceeds to hearing, trial, or final submission of petition, the student will have the opportunity to organize and present evidence. Videotaped and critiqued simulations will help prepare for these proceedings. Seminars focus on supervised and collaborative lawyering, interviewing and counseling clients, interviewing and preparing witnesses, oral arguments, and the persuasive presentation of written evidence. Seminars involve background reading, written and in-class exercises, full-scale simulations, and analysis of task performance in actual cases.

A “planning-doing-reflecting” model helps students compare outcomes with what they had anticipated. Student reflection includes analysis of the impact of the law, legal systems, lawyers, and adjudicators on the larger social issues and phenomena that are the context of immigration law.

Students must arrange their schedules to accommodate appearances in the Immigration Court at 26 Federal Plaza, near the Brooklyn Bridge and Pace New York (about 1 hour by car from the Law School). Preference is given to third- and fourth-year students. Immigration Law and/or Asylum and Refugee Law are strongly recommended, as is Interviewing, Counseling, and Negotiation.